Everything Your Business Needs To Market, Sell and Deliver Your Services Online

300 million—the number of people on Instagram every single day. Businesses are taking advantage of Instagram by using it as a resource to gain popularity and increase their customer base. In fact, top brands like Nike and National Geographic have over 60 million Instagram followers! So why would any business pass up this opportunity? If you’re not a regular ‘grammer, starting your own page (and growing it) can be overwhelming. The success of your Instagram will be determined by how you run your account. These Instagram tips will help you gain a booming fan following, and lead the way to sensation status. Instagram Tips #1: #Hashtags Hashtags could be one of the most important components of gaining popularity on Instagram. Posts that include at least one hashtag have seen up to 12.6% increased engagement . To put it simply, hashtags are a tag that helps categorize photos with the same theme or content. In your mastery of hashtags, make sure to keep them short, simple and most importantly, relevant. For example, when posting a photo of my fancy new watch, I may use the hashtags #watch, #michaelkors and #rosegold. Short, sweet and descriptive. If you want to connect to local ‘grammers, hashtags with your location are a good idea. Additionally, many businesses create their own unique hashtag and ask their followers to use it. For example, Coca-Cola encourages their fans to post Instagram Coke photos with the hashtag #ShareaCoke . This can be a great marketing tool, and help define your brand online. Another important note to remember is to not over-hashtag, as this can make your posts look spammy, and will actually attract other spam accounts. Instagram Tips #2: Tag a brand When you tag another Instagram account in your photos, your photo will show up in the brand’s ‘“photos of you” section of their profile. They will receive a notification, and with any luck, may even engage with your post! Better yet, they could also start following you back, or even re-gram your photo! Make sure the photo actually features the brand, otherwise you can get flagged for spam. Most big brands will have an Instagram account, and chances are, they probably have an expansive list of followers themselves. For example , a jeweler could take a photo of a piece from their newest collection, and tag the designer in the photo. Getting some exposure from a big brand could help you significantly increase followers, and in turn, get more likes! Instagram Tips #3: Use Visually Appealing Photos Although it seems obvious, this point is oh-so important. You don’t have to be an expert photographer to have a stellar collection of Instagram photos, but you may need some practice. One of the most important bits of advice is to keep it simple. If you are featuring products in a photo, make sure the background is simple so that your product stands out. A cluttered photo will take away from what you are trying to promote. Sometimes, a crisp white background is the best option. Instagram has many filters to choose from, so take some time to play around with them to see which one suits your photo best! Does your photo look best without a filter? Simply leave it alone! Alternatively, Instagram gives you the option to use their editing tools, where you can make some simple adjustments like brightening or removing shadows, rather than choosing a filter. Take a few different photos and decide which is the most visually appealing. Taking good photos may take a bit of time, but like anything, practice makes perfect. Don’t give up, and you’ll be taking photos like a pro in no time! Instagram Tips #4: Know Your Audience It’s important to remember your audience and who you are targeting with your posts. What is the purpose of your Instagram page? Whether the purpose is to educate, promote or entertain followers, you should keep that in mind with each and every photo and caption. If your account is purely professional, keep it informative and concise. If you are marketing towards a younger audience and want to keep things fun and upbeat, ensure the dialog matches accordingly. Try using some emojis, be goofy and have fun! Show people what you are passionate about, and just remember to target the people with your same interests! Instagram Tips #5: Ask For It Your Instagram account is a conversation point with your customers. Most followers scroll through their feed passively, and won’t take any action unless it’s asked of them. Give them a call to action, and ask for it! For example, Double tap if you like coffee, tag a friend who likes coffee, share this photo if you love coffee, click the link in our bio for free coffee, etc. (Can you tell what’s on my mind right now?) If your customers oblige, this will increase your page’s activity, likes, and followers. Most importantly, don’t forget to have a little bit of fun! Happy ‘grammin!

The importance of responding to customers online could not be more prevalent as reviews continue to grow more than ever before. Aside from the fact that reviews from customers help others decide whether they should visit a business or not, reviews are now more prevalent on search results pages—meaning a lot of eyes can see what is being said about your company online. The influence that reviews have on shoppers is staggering: more than 88% of online shoppers incorporate reviews into their purchase decisions (Webrepublic, 2015). Businesses are told to get more reviews on review websites to keep attracting new customers. With so many review websites out there, where does a business even begin? Your business may be afraid to manage customer reviews on review sites as you may not want to end up in one of these situations: receive zero reviews receive zero recent online reviews receive negative online reviews or, your business simply has unmanaged online reviews across multiple review websites Unfortunately, your business is missing out. This lack of free online word of mouth is actually hurting your business through inaction, because reputation drives conversion. 1) Business reviews and social posts help shape your company’s online reputation In fact, one of the worst things your business can do is ignore your online reviews and social posts. As easy as it is to make a mistake when handling your business’s online reputation, it can also be easy to recover if done properly (and with apology). While damage will inevitably happen, your business can take steps to mitigate the degree of damage that can occur. The biggest mistake of all your company can make is not participating in helping to shape the conversation about your company online. 2) Business reviews provide valuable feedback for your business While it can be easy for your business to take negative comments to heart, it is important to recognize that reviews are constructive feedback. All in all, reviews are valuable feedback! They help your company gauge their performance and see how you can improve. There is always room for improvement and a lot can be learned even from positive business reviews. Through reviews, your business can see which products or services you should be boasting, which needs work, and even discover which employees rock at customer service. 3) Your business reviews can now appear in search results Search engines have caught on to the popularity of reviews and are now displaying them more prominently. So, if someone searches for your business, there is a chance that reviews from review websites could be displayed on the search engine results pages. In Google’s markup—the annotated content that appears in search—of a company or product, business reviews and ratings can now be included in search results. In other words, when a user performs a search on Google, Google will find and possibly display review summaries from online business reviews and consumer ratings. Below is an example of how business reviews now showing up in search results. 

What is Page Speed? Page speed is the amount of time it takes for the content on a website’s page to fully load. In a world where people have come to expect instantaneous results, faster is better. In fact, nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that isn’t loaded within 3 seconds, according to surveys done by Akamai and Gomez.com . But how long do most websites take to load? The standards many have been using for page load time come from a study conducted by Geoff Kenyon where he compares website speed against the rest of the web: if your site loads in 5 seconds, it is faster than approximately 25% of the web if your site loads in 2.9 seconds, it is faster than approximately 50% of the web if your site loads in 1.7 seconds, it is faster than approximately 75% of the web if your site loads in 0.8 seconds, it is faster than approximately 94% of the web So how can you determine how your website stacks up? How to Determine Your Page Speed and Score Here’s how to measure how your website stacks up: Hop into your website’s Google Analytics Site Speed reports. This will give you an idea of how your site has performed over various time periods and the load speed of each of your pages. Enter your site’s URL into Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool . This will give you a report card on your website’s speed performance on mobile devices and desktop. The report comes with some recommended actions you can take to improve your site’s speed. Check Pingdom’s website speed test to find out the speed, rank and percent faster than the average of Pingdom’s tested websites GTMetrix will provide a comprehensive look at your site’s speed optimization status. Note: Don’t puzzle yourself when you see different speed timing in Pingdom and Gtmetrix. As Pingdom will show you load time (The time it takes to show the first result of your website—that’s what google counts and you should too) and GTmetrix will show you full load time (The time it takes to show full page with it’s full functionality running). For further understanding, it’s always good to see the speed waterfall from both tools. Why Does Page Speed Matter? Bridging the gap between user expectations (2 seconds) and average website load time (5 seconds) is the goal of page speed optimization and the tactics we’ll outline later. But why exactly does page speed matter? It comes down to 3 main interconnected reasons: 1. Speed Kills UX User experience is probably the most important reason you should care about website speed, so we’ll start here. People don’t have the patience for slow loading websites anymore. In the beginning, just connecting to the internet required a tolerance that just doesn’t exist anymore. Today, people are constantly online and you’ve got 3 seconds maximum to display your page or they’re gone. More than 3 seconds creates a poor user experience and the bar is only going to get higher in the future. 2. Speed Kills SEO User experience is actually the driving force behind the SEO implications of site speed. While Google has been slow to officially reveal whether slow websites would receive ranking demotions, it appears that those days are coming . You need to make sure your website is ready. 3. Speed Kills Conversions Your site speed’s effect on conversions is what should really catch your attention. How can you move people through your funnel if each step takes forever? Your super-fans will do it, but those new, hesitant people who are prone to buyers-remorse will bounce. 8 Tactics to Make Your Website Load Faster Speeding up your site is not necessarily going to be a snap. If you have a small, light site you may just need to try a couple of tactics on this list. However, large, older sites with a lot of code and content may require some persistence and the implementation of several tactics on the following list. Here’s where to start: 1. Leverage browser caching: When you visit sites, your browser often caches pages on the site to speed up load time. Browser caching stores webpage resource files on a local computer when a user visits a webpage, so leveraging browser caching is when you instruct browsers how their resources should be dealt with. Things can slow down when the response from your server does not include caching headers or if resources are specified to be cached for only a short time. Leveraging caching will load your pages much faster for repeat visitors and so will other pages that share those same resources. Here’s how to do it 2. Optimize images: If images load faster, your site loads faster, period. Google notes that “…images often account for most of the downloaded bytes on a page. As a result, optimizing images can often yield some of the largest byte savings and performance improvements.” This means that you can get some big improvements when the images on your pages can be optimized to reduce their file size without significantly impacting their visual quality. Here’s how to do it 3. Minify HTML, CSS & JavaScript: Minifying removes any unnecessary characters that are not required for the code to execute. Sources of redundant data that you can remove includes code comments and formatting, removing unused code, using shorter variable and function names, and more. Here’s how to do it 4. Enable gzip compression: Gzip compression drastically reduces the size of files sent from your server when someone visits your website. This will speed things up considerably. According to GTMetrix , “The reason gzip works so well in a web environment is because CSS files and HTML files use a lot of repeated text and have loads of whitespace. Since gzip compresses common strings, this can reduce the size of pages and style sheets by up to 70%!” Here’s how to do it 5. Reduce server response time: Server response time is the amount of time it takes for a web server to respond to a request from a browser. This is a key issue to address because if your server response time is slow your pages will display slow, no matter how optimized your pages are for speed. Google says you should reduce your server response time under 200ms. So how do you make this happen? Here’s how to do it 6. Avoid landing page redirects: Your site can really slow down when you have more than one redirect from the given URL to the final landing page. This sets off a redirect loop that takes time to process. Here are a few examples of redirects that can slow things down: example.com → m.example.com/home – multi-roundtrip penalty for mobile users. example.com → www.example.com → m.example.com – very slow mobile experience. Here’s how to do it 7. Prioritize visible content: This is the exact message you’ll get from Google’s PageSpeed tool when additional network round trips are required to render the above the fold content of the page. This “above the fold” content is what you see on a desktop or device when you visit a page. So prioritizing visible content is the recommendation that you prioritize things so that essential elements on your page load first (and quickly) for users and that you defer secondary page elements like social sharing plugins, analytics javascript, etc. Here’s how to do it 8. Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content: JavaScript and CSS resources often prevent your page from displaying until they’re fully loaded. This is often a good idea, since the premature display of your above the fold content can look pretty grotesque. However, this is a common message you’ll get from Google about site speed, and addressing it can really take your page speed up a few notches. Here’s how to do it Note: This is the hardest thing to fix for most people. There are WordPress plugins that just do it but they can make your site look like Frankenstein on every load.  Want lightning-fast, Google Cloud-hosted WordPress sites? Contact us today!